


pull down the mountain (your cities to the sea)

by mouseymightymarvellous



Category: Naruto
Genre: Body Horror, Captivity, F/M, Healing, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Sakura's self-esteem issues, Torture
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-10
Updated: 2019-02-10
Packaged: 2019-10-25 14:28:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17726951
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mouseymightymarvellous/pseuds/mouseymightymarvellous
Summary: You can never go back, but you can always come home again.title is from florence + the machine'sbig god





	pull down the mountain (your cities to the sea)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [amako](https://archiveofourown.org/users/amako/gifts).



> Ages and ages and ages ago, now, I started this fic as a response to [a specific piece](http://dimancheetoile.tumblr.com/post/174769033818/what-is-it-that-i-hear-did-somebody-say) by Mako. And then I finally sat down to finish it.
> 
> Also also, _Big God_ is an excellent song to accompany this. Which happened to be a delightful benefit to my habit of titling ShikaSaku fic after Florence + the Machine songs.

Sakura wishes that there was any light to speak of, but even if she could see anything, she doubts she’d be able to identify the species of her little beetle friends. She’s much too far from the forests of Hi no Kuni for them to be a species she recognizes. (Thanks to two months spent hunting bandits with Team 8 one long, unending humid summer, Sakura has a fairly encyclopedic knowledge of local insects and she can make a decent go of tracking a small group through the torrential summer rains, at least until a more competent tracker shows up to take over.)

She’s not even completely sure they’re beetles, given the lack of light, but then she also hadn’t paid all that much attention to Shino’s murmured lectures on the evolutionary traits of different insect orders. She’d mostly just memorized enough to put names to specific morphologies. Anyways, if it has six legs and hardened forewings, “beetle” is a pretty good guess for an insect, given their predominance in the animal kingdom.

If she survives this, Sakura will try to bring one or two home with her, and Shino can tell her if she needs to apologize to them for her mistaken identification.

Sakura likes her beetle friends; it’s nice to know that she isn’t alone down here. Now, if only she, too, could as easily carve tunnels through the dirt and crawl her way to the surface.

Six legs and a set of mandibles would probably help with the digging.

That’s three limbs and an extra set of mouth parts she’s missing.

Sakura wonders if there are any blood limits out there with insectoid traits. If Hoshigaki Kisame and his gills once walked around, then it’s likely.

Sakura lives in a weird world where anything is possible.

Which is why she’s surviving to get out of here.

Anything is possible.

Sakura did not survive Team 7 and a war and Tsunade-shishō’s training only to die in a damp cave at the whims of some sadist who wants to remake the world in his image.

And, really, what the fuck is up with these men who think they have the right to the world?

Sakura would give her other arm for a competent woman to try her hand at it.

Subjugating the world, that is.

The Godaime Mizukage did a pretty good job subjugating a country, she supposes, but Sakura doesn’t think that was quite the same thing.

Maybe Sakura will change career paths when she gets out of here, except, shit, then she wouldn’t have any hands to try with, would she?

Sakura could probably convince someone out there to be her hands.

Also, if she gives the other arm up, she’d probably be able to grow that one back.

She’d managed it with her left, after all, the first two times they cut it off.

(Sakura doesn’t want to think about what she did to ensure it didn’t grow back a third time. She doesn’t want to think about the cost of that sacrifice, of what it would have cost her to not make it.)

She’s going to have a lot of time to think about the perfect villain aesthetic while she’s here. Good strong brand messaging will probably help her in her goals of domination. The Akatsuki at least had that going for them: those cloaks both had mystery and were thematically appropriate.

Sakura’s aesthetic is going to involve the colour pink completely unironically. And probably a flower motif. Would the two, together, be too much?

Sakura will have to ask Ino when she sees her.

She’s also going to have to ask Ino for help to do something about the whole… hair situation Sakura has going on.

Sakura is a fan of her beetle friends.

She’s no so much of a fan of the lice currently feasting on her skull.

Sakura wonders if this is the Universe’s way of telling her she isn’t meant to have long hair.

If it is, she’d have appreciated it if the Universe could have taken a less elaborate and traumatic route to ensuring Sakura lopped off her, finally, hip length hair.

A particularly mischievous small child with a wad of gum, perhaps. Or an overenthusiastic genin with a fire jutsu.

So many options that didn’t involve Sakura farther from her home than she’s ever been, and never more alone.

 

 

The third thing her captors tried was cutting her out of her skin, as if her body was what Sakura is instead of just the place she happens to live.

A lifetime earlier, it might have worked: knives and saws and enough blood to drown out the ocean.

But Sakura has unmade herself a dozen times over, all light and heat and sheer force of will.

When their leader punched her in the face and knocked out her front teeth, Sakura had smiled through the mouthful of blood and hoped that the shards in his knuckles scarred.

She’s not going to be the only one left unmarked.

She’s the only one who will be left to walk out of here, when she’s finished.

 

 

It’s too many lazy mistakes (not her own), seven months of communication black out for an undercover mission, exhaustion, and two betrayals that got her here.

Sakura can count her age in the ever decreasing rings of her circle of trust.

To be the oldest nin in the world must be to be the loneliest, the closest to death.

Sakura wonders how much longer she’ll have to live before there’s no one left to her who is not herself.

 

 

As she digs her remaining fingers into the dirt of her cage, Sakura wishes that she had the Mokuton.

She plants her rage in the soil around her, but the seeds of it are waiting for a firestorm to pass before they bloom.

Sakura wishes that she had the Mokuton and Uzumaki chakra coils, strength enough to break herself out of her prison, but all she ever manages to do is help the noose slip tighter.

She threads her chakra through her fingers to coil into the dirt.

It doesn’t crawl the way beetles do, all scurrying quickness, but rather creeps in the way of roots shifting through soil in the pursuit of water, full of slow purpose and glacial intent.

Four feet away, and the chakra string finally snaps, recoiling on her.

Sakura hisses and brings her scorched fingers up to her mouth.

 

 

Sakura thinks she might have been afraid of the dark, once.

If she ever was, it was a lifetime ago, and now she sinks into the cool embrace of shadows, and waits, the scurrying of insect legs on the floor a familiar comfort.

 

 

If her captors ever had a plan for her, Sakura is pretty sure they’ve given it up.

She wonders how much longer she’ll have to keep from shattering before they give up on her completely and leave her here in her cell to rot into nothingness.

 

 

 

It occurs to her at a certain point, with a kind of shocking clarity, that she's never been waiting for Team 7 to show up to save her.

It hurts, that it never even occurred to her to hope.

That Sakura is still here, trapped, is evidence enough that Sai was also captured or is dead. He was working the other end of the mission that got her here, and if he had escaped Sai would have been able to direct a rescue in her direction. When weeks had gone by and Sakura hadn't heard even a whisper of Konoha, she had accepted with the cold clarity that she learned throughout the war that Sai was dead. (She can't bear the thought that he might be somewhere in this or some other cave system, screaming in pain, and she can't help him. Better that he be dead, until she can look him in the face and know otherwise.)

She's lost time to pain and fever and the deep void at the heart of her that she can fall into where nothing hurts anymore, where it's all just darkness and silence, but Sakura has been here for months and months and months, and she's never thought to hope for anyone to save her but herself.

In Konoha, team is supposed to mean everything, and all Sakura has ever expected is to claw her own way up to meet the sun, inch by painful inch,

It's all she's ever known: crawling forward on her own.

 

 

On the other side of her cell, Inner sits quietly, going ever more mad.

Sakura doesn’t know how she’s going to bring her along when it comes to leave.

Sakura doesn’t know what will be left of her when they survive this. She'll be ever more alone, ever closer to being the loneliest nin in existence.

 

 

 

There are faces that Sakura never lets herself remember, never lets herself hope for.

They don't belong with her here under the earth. She could not bear for them to become just another set of ghosts haunting her.

 

 

There are a lot of ways to use pain to break someone.

Tsunade-shishō and Shizune-senpai tutored Sakura in them pretty religiously.

Sakura has flesh, sure, blood and bone and gristle, but she learned long ago how to make that her own, just another tool to clean and take apart.

By age fifteen, she’d had most of the fear of pain burned out of her. Ten more years as a shinobi took care of the rest.

It’s the sensation of waiting, hoping, praying for Kakashi-sensei and Naruto to show up to training, splinters in her palms and the night air growing ever colder around her, that she’s never managed to shake.

Alone in her cave, Sakura listens to the sound of insect legs on the ground and the slow drip of water.

Across from her, even Inner is fading out.

Sakura wonders if she was ever really there in the first place.

Maybe all Sakura has ever been is alone.

 

 

And, oh, now then, isn’t that interesting?

“Hello,” Sakura thinks, and prods a little more carefully at the dirt with the smallest seeking, creeping tendril of her chakra string.

Now, isn’t that fortuitous.

“Sorry about this, Tenten,” Sakura mutters before she rears back, and stabs her chakra through the ground, to prick through Tenten’s palm where it’s pressed against the dirt at the base of a tree, where the forests of Shodai have long faded into something smaller until they pass almost right into grassland, far from the edges of Hi no Kuni’s borders.

Tenten’s hand recoils, snapping the chakra string, sending it recoiling through the earth until it lashes against Sakura, prompting all the other tendrils she’s been feeding outward to collapse.

“Damn.”

That wasn’t enough. Sakura should have held out longer, but the surprise was too much.

People, her people, and close, too.

Close enough.

Closer than she could have ever really hoped.

What are they doing so far from home?

Sakura doesn’t know how long it’s been, down here in the dark. And even before that, she’d been on mission for months. She is more unaware of Konoha’s going ons than the most sequestered housewife in the most isolated corner of Tsuchi no Kuni. She has no idea why Tenten is in the area, and couldn’t manage to keep her chakra tendril intact long enough to figure out who she was even with.

Across from her, Inner is laughing.

It is not a particularly comforting sound.

Sakura listens to the scuttling of beetle legs, breathes deeply, and reaches out once more.

 

 

“How did you tell them where to find us?”

And, really, if he wants an answer, the least this asshole could do would be to stop crushing her trachea with his foot.

She certainly isn’t telling them anything if she can’t breathe.

Though, given by the wild eyes, the stench of fear, and the general shiftiness of the guards lining the interrogation room, Sakura isn’t all that sure that they’re looking for a true answer, here.

What’s-his-face doesn’t let up on the pressure, and Sakura lets herself drift away on the wonderful lightheadedness that oxygen-deprivation provides.

She’s more than familiar with the feeling by now: the instinctive fear response has long been burned out of her.

It’s too bad that she doesn’t have the chakra left to filter out the accumulating toxins from the cellular respiration process.

Sakura hums, and digs her fingers into the familiar gouge marks on the floor.

Home, sweet home.

She’s almost all the way to unconscious when the pressure lets up, and without her permission, her lungs heave with the effort of breathing.

It burns her throat.

She mumbles.

“What was that?” The Man Who Would Burn The World asks, and bends down to better hear her.

He really, really shouldn’t have.

 

 

As the cave system collapses on top of her, Inner sits alone in the dark, laughing and laughing and laughing.

(She’ll never quite stop it, laughing alone with Sakura in the dark.)


End file.
